How to use twitter

Twitter is everywhere right now, you can’t turn around without tripping over a newspaper, blog or celebrity explaining how it’s the next big thing. But like most social networks/web 2.0 technologies they are tailored for the geek and can be quite inaccessible to those that do not have the time to invest in learning them. So I present my twitter jargon buster that should provide you with all the information you need on how to use twitter and what you need to know to get started.

Twitter jargon buster

twitter – a service that people use to shout about what they are doing right now, share ideas & news and ask for help from others.

tweet – a twitter message, a 140 character update about anything and everything. Messages are public unless a profile is protected.

timeline - this is your homepage on twitter it shows all the messages you send and messages that people you are following send.

direct tweet – a personal message to you that only you and the sender can see (essentially a 140 character email). You can only direct message users that are following you.

follow – people you follow whose tweets will show up in your timeline. The more people you follow the more interesting twitter is, be careful though, following too many people can lead to a high noise to signal ratio.

followed – people who are following your tweets

Protected profiles – You can only see the updates on these profiles if they follow you. Essentially a private twitter profile.

@ – a reply to someone else’s twitter message i.e. @icrossing_uk Great intro post about twitter

RT or retweet – a message that is repeated because someone thinks it particularly good i.e. RT @icrossing_uk Great intro post about twitter

shorturls – as space in a twitter message is at a premium you can often need to convert long URLs into shorturls so they can fit in a message. Short URLs 301 redirect to the actual URL you want to link to. Some popular short url services are bit.ly and tinyurl

# – hash tags are used to tag tweets with a theme or event i.e. #seslondon would be used in a tweet so everyone knows its related to SES London

search feeds – you can use these to keep track of certain words on twitter. For example I have search feeds set up for eyesnight, icrossing and seslondon. You can also use it to see all messages a particular user is sending and receiving. A search feed for icrossing_uk would show all the messages that icrossing_uk sends and @ messages it receives.

twitter spam – accounts that are set up to deliberately spam twitter

Desktop applications

There are a variety of desktop apps for keeping track of twitter but my favourite is tweet deck (makes it very easy to set up search feeds and create short URLs) other popular applications include twirl and digsby. I’d recommend turning off alerts otherwise it can be very distracting.

Mobile applications

Popular mobile applications for following twitter include twidroid (android), twitterric and twoble (windows mobile)

Wordpress plugins

Some tips for wordpress users, there are some great twitter plugins out there for intergrating twitter on to your blog. My favourites are:

Chat catcher and Tweetbacks – Both plugins scan twitter for tweets made about your blog and then add them as comments to your blog posts.
Tweet suite – A plugin with lots of twitter integration features and sidebar widgets (such as displaying your latest tweet)
Twitter avatars in comments – Shows twitter profile images for commenters or defaults to gravatars if not available.
WP greet box and Referrer detector – Greet twitter referrals with a custom message. Great for reminding people to follow your twitter.
Ping.fm – Automatically post new blog posts to your twitter (as well as to other social network services)

No matter how much you read about twitter you won’t understand it until you start using it. So I recommend setting up an account, letting twitter scan your email for friends already using it, and begin twittering away!